SEEMS FITTING FOR A SUNDAY: My pal Trisha has prodded me to write something, and although I don't have anything new right now I thought I'd post something I wrote a while back that I liked:

We feel terrible when someone dies, in part because we feel that we have, in some way, died too. We might even say things like, “A part of me has died.” Which part are we referring to? Are we not whole people? What we may mean instead is that we are part of the person who has died...and they are part of us. And so we feel as if we, too, have died, are dying, and faced with that we are doubly afraid and unsettled.

Many of us are wrestle with the fact that our friends and family – and ourselves, at some point -- will die and be forgotten, will be left alone to disintegrate...and eventually to disappear entirely. We worry that life is finite, or as Alan Watts once referred to it, a brief flash of light between two periods of infinite darkness.

But there is in death the possibility for a kind of miracle, if we look for it. It's much like what the Christians have been saying for two millennia: We are indeed capable of engineering resurrection. By embracing our dead loved one's memory and essence, and by figuratively carrying them out of sacred space -- the church, the temple, the meditation hall -- with us when we leave it, by living out the full potential and potency of their inspiration, by wrapping ourselves in their soul and spirit...we can almost literally lift them up from the dead. They ride with us, in us, out of sacred space and into life again.

While I don't believe I'll ever see a dead person stand up and walk days after her death, I do believe in the resurrection that a community of friends and family can provide -- for the departed, and for themselves. And I believe that is not simply a possibility but a responsibility of those left behind to lift life up to its highest purpose, and to walk on as if buoyed by the vaporous spirit of the departed. I believe that by carrying deceased souls with us, we are ourselves lifted up and made lighter.